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Many people are afraid. Afraid of their own feelings. Afraid of the feelings of others. They don’t know how to handle their own anger, or sadness, or shame. And they much less know how to maturely handle the feelings of others.
If you feel uneasy about some feelings you (or other people) are having at times, all the filthy, queasy emotional stuff, this is for you.
1. Where feelings come from
I always thought that feelings are an end of...

Oh, I love paradoxes. This is a nasty one.
You see, what keeps intimate relationships alive and thriving is not fear. It’s the joy.
Fear of losing one another might be responsible for keeping you together. But if you have more attachment (scarcity-mode – what do I mean by that?) than relaxed joy (abundance mode), you either have one of those horrible zombie-relationships, or one of the partners is going to call quits on the...

I said earlier that 80-90% of conflict resolution is attitude, but for the remaining 10-20%there are also some skills & techniques you need to practice to effectively get others to “re-open their hearts” in tough conflicts.
I’m taking this image from two mediation trainers I love and respect, Liv and Kay Larsson. (You can find their awesome book on mediation here).
It all lies in your hands…
The conflict skills...

Okay, so we covered the difference between needs and strategies and how to dissolve enemy images.
Let’s drill a bit deeper now.
The transformation happens, when…
To let a transformation in a conflict happen, it’s good to have 3 things.
1) You care about all the needs in the room equally.
When it doesn’t matter whether they’re your needs or the needs of the others, whether they’re needs that are easier to...

When I give trainings, one of the first exercises is asking people: “What are three actions that you can’t empathize with? Where even with all your understanding and love for humanity you say ‘I can’t understand how anybody does this!’?”.
They then usually say something like “beating my own children”, “being a Nazi”, “raping someone”, “murdering someone” etc....

Yesterday I started with telling you why I believe conflict resolution is one of the most underrated but also most important skills when it comes to changing the world.
So: How do you do it? How do you solve conflicts in a way that leaves everybody content? No suck-it-up-and-grin, no resentment left over, no breakdown in communications?
For that, you first need to understand how conflicts arise.
1. What people want and need are two very...

I have this theory.
A majority of the problems we as humanity are having right now are not solved yet because so few people know how to solve conflicts. Not manage, play down or compromise on conflicts, but solve them in a way that honors if not meets the needs of everybody involved & affected.
This is one of the areas where so many people actually believe it’s impossible.
“Heck, if I can’t even fight productively with my...

I got this from my very good friend Tassilo.
It’s another paradoxical, but very simple technique.
Whenever you feel scared or overwhelmed, tell yourself: “This problem is too small for me.”
Say it out loud. Write it down. Pin it on the wall.
There are a lot of tasks in any given week that scare me. Things could go wrong, we could lose money, I could look stupid (this is the biggest fear).
Whenever I say this to myself, on a...

On of the greatest leverages you can have on your productivity, if you’re working full-time, is paradoxical: It’s not working more, or smarter (though the latter might help). It’s taking more – and better – breaks.
This topic warrants a much longer post, but for now I will leave you with this and one simple technique:
1. Research on breaks
There was a study on what differentiates the top 1% from the top 0,1% of...

If you spend some time in the startup scene, this is a central part of the pep talk you’ll hear.
Just Fucking Do It, man! JFDI!
And for conquering the initial fears it’s awesome.
It teaches you to put out an early, crappy prototype to get actual customer feedback – instead of wasting 2 years in “stealth mode”, only to find out that nobody wants the thing you’ve been working on.
It encourages you to conquer...

About

Hi, I'm Georg, founder of the social businesses soulbottles and soulwater.
In here I share my experiences and try to teach you what I wished I'd known earlier about changing the world for the better.Follow @georgtarne